Red Wine Glazed Pear and Vanilla Cake

A pear and vanilla cake drenched in a sweet red wine sauce. Hmm, can there be anything better? There are a few tricks to this delicious pear cake. Since pears are an acidic fruit, baking with pear pulp could be tricky. To prevent the fruit's natural acids from neutralizing the role of the baking soda in the cake batter, the amount of baking soda was increased. The second trick was to add the mashed pear pulp at the final stage of the cake batter preparation. The final key to success with this pear cake, is bake the cake immediately, as soon as the pear pulp is blended in, this will reduce any time for acid neutralization of the baking soda. Glazing this cake is easy, just pour all the sauce over the top of the cake and let it drip by itself from the sides. Do not even bother to wipe the excess red wine sauce from the base of the plate, you can scoop some of it with every slice you cut. Believe me, your guests will thank you for the "mess", this one time.

Peel and core the pear and then coarsely chop and place the fruit in a microwaveable bowl.

Microwave the fruit for 30-45 seconds and then mash the fruit with a fork to make a puree.

Prepare a 9" round cake pan by greasing the sides with butter and sprinkling a little flour on the sides.

Whisk the flour and baking powder together and keep aside. Cream together the butter and the sugar. Carefully add one egg at a time to the creamed butter-sugar mixture and beat them in completely.

With a blunt knife take one of the halved vanilla beans and scrape out all the little black seeds. Transfer the seeds into the creamed mixture and beat again till dispersed.

Add 1/4 of the flour mixture to the creamed mixture and beat till incorporated. Similarly, add the rest of the flour mixture in 1/4 proportions to the batter till completely mixed.

The mashed pear pulp will be cool by now, reserve one tablespoon aside. Gently fold in the rest of the pear pulp into the cake batter and immediately pour it out on to the pre-greased cake pan.

Bake for about 30-45 minutes or till a knife comes out clean from the center.

Once the cake is baked, allow it to cool for 10 minutes in the cake pan and then for another 1 hour on a wire rack.

Chill the cake for about 30 minutes before decorating it with the wine sauce.

In a thick-bottomed stock pot, heat all the ingredients together, including the extra pear pulp that was reserved earlier from the cake.

Strip the rest of the vanilla bean to extract the seeds and add it to the pot. You can also add the left-over stalk of the vanilla bean from the cake to this. Let the entire contents reduce to about 50ml.

Remove and discard the cinnamon and vanilla bean stalks.

This sauce will thicken as it cools down and you may need to warm it up again.

Put the cake on a turntable and pour the sweet red wine sauce in the center of the cake and allow the excess sauce to drip from the sides.

Chill the cake again in the refrigerator to allow the sauce to set. You can then bring the cake to room temperature before serving.